It’s an adventurous, Bowie-esque conceit, and songs like “American Sports” and the “Ultracheese” aren’t without a certain vermouth-zonked charm. “I’m a big name in deep space/Ask your mates/But golden boy’s in bad shape,” he sings on the album-opening “Star Treatment,” playing a has-been rocker so washed up he’s consigned to playing for bored lunar drunks.
Turner romances his Steinway, tapping influences like French crooner Serge Gainsbourg’s oily Sixties ballads louche, late-Seventies Leonard Cohen and the space-age bachelor pad music hipsters were down with in the Nineties. Their five-years-in-the-making Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a lounge-pop concept record set in a casino piano bar on the moon.
The Monkeys have come a long way since the wordy, stungun punk rock of their 2005 hit “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor.” A really long way. The Arctic Monkeys‘ Alex Turner is the Damon Albarn of his Brit-pop generation – the restless artist who refuses to sit still in one sound too long.
